The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings - Lot 135 : From Beneath The Trees (Chapter 1 of 2)

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Lot 135 : From Beneath The Trees (Chapter 1 of 2) Consigned by Christian Wallis Starring Conan Freeman   **Many thanks for patronizing our curious little establishment through the Rocket Money and Shopify links below. Your continued support helps keep the lamps lit and the shelves full of peculiar treasures. We are most grateful. 📦 Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/tash 📱Mint Mobile: https://mintmobile.com/SINISTER 💚Antiquarium shop: https://theantiquarium.myshopify.com   Theme music by The Newton Brothers   Produced by Kevin Seaman   Additional music by CO.AG ([e-mail])   Clement Panchout   Vivek Abhishek   SUBSCRIBE to them on YOUTUBE: / vivekhsihba   LIKE them on FACEBOOK:  https://rb.gy/nhgn0i Follow them on Spotify/ iTunes/ Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/rxdcjqt   From Beneath The Trees appears in the collection Shattered Teeth by Christian Wallis Published by Velox Books Visit veloxbooks.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For an ad-free experience, visit the obsidiancovenant.com. W equals P. Please, come in. Mine the display case beside the register. Some of the older pieces have a habit of attracting curious hands. This particular item is one of them. A revolver. Blued steel.

Walnut grips. Six chambers. Most people imagine tragedy arriving with a bang, loud, sudden, and unmistakable. The truth is often far crueller. Sometimes it arrives quietly. In a familiar face, a vacant stare. The account that follows was recovered years later among a collection of personal writing. I've preserved it exactly as it was given to me.

I call this one From Beneath the Trees, Part 1. Before we begin, I want to point out some of the customers whose names have been etched in brass on this beautiful plaque I had made above the front desk. These are some of the members of the inner circle of the antiquarium. We go by The Obsidian Covenant.

Recent initiates include Lauren Roberts, Tamika Turi, Greylow, JRS 1228, and Alex McIntyre.

We are ever appreciative of your devotion to the order. Go to the Obsidian covenant.com to receive the sacrament. Sounds harmless enough, right? Welcome to the antiquarium of sinister happenings and odd goings on. It was two weeks ago.

I stole a few beers when the adults weren't looking and shared them with Lucy Sitkins away from the crowd. She drank hers greedily as we sat beneath the bow of a low tree, speaking low so when a passers-by could hear. Every time we whispered, we tilted our faces a little closer and closer. There was a moment where I thought she was going to rest her head on my shoulder as she told me about how she wanted to be a vet. And my heart skipped as I debated putting my arm around her. It was all cut short when her father, Larry, stood in front of everyone at the party and forced a beer can down his throat. I didn't see it. I only heard the crime.

that had us both sitting up right beneath the branches. By the time we got back to the party, the adults were escorting the kids away, and ambulance sirens were fast approaching. Dad was there, and he told me to take my little sister home. The grim and frightening look on his face made me forget about Lucy and the smell of beer on her breath. I try hard to remember if she ate from the barbecue.

Sometimes I think she didn't. Other times, I swear I can picture her biting into a burger and it's so vivid. I think it must be a memory. It's moot either way. I'll never see her again. I felt a little gross when I went to school the next day

and asked around if the stories about her dad were true. When my father got home the night of the party, he hadn't spoken to me or mom. He just went to bed and didn't tell us what happened. Come morning,

I saw some of the older kids by the school gates and overheard him talking. The details made my stomach churn. But I wanted to know more. I didn't want to act all excited about something terrible. But this felt like the kind of thing people would be talking about for years. Larry Sitkins had swallowed a beer can,

shoved it down his throat like a fucking bow constrictor eating an egg. At least that's how one kid described it to me. There was more, of course. He'd praised Satan before slit in his own throat, gotten pissed drunk and fallen onto the... ground while chugging a beer. Tried to catch a can mid-air. Someone had punched a mid-sip.

There were a lot of variations of what happened and how, but they were only theories that got turned into rumors. A lot of us were just trying to make sense of it. Larry was a pretty run-of-the-mill guy. He was a landscaper who made lame jokes at kids' birthday parties. He was about as nondescript as they came. at least as far as a bunch of teenagers were concerned. We got halfway through the day before Mr. Straub

shut the bleachers on his neck. It was in front of the cheerleaders. There were ambulances again. Crying girls and boys and even some of the teachers. Most of them just looked confused, except for Mr. Straw. I managed to catch a glimpse of them as I jogged over. to find out what all the screaming was about.

He looked empty, all thoughts and emotions, with his head set at a crooked angle. I figured that was how people must look when, but apparently he'd been like that during the act. He'd walked up, perched his neck between the slatted benches, and hit the remote button to slide the bleachers closed. the whole time he was just slack-jawed and stupid-looking

even as the metal mechanism crunched vertebrae and cartilage like this too when he killed himself he was getting ready to pop the tab on a fresh beer when he simply stopped looked up to the sky then forced the whole thing

down his throat in a single world-shattering moment I didn't know it back then but there were others just like Larry and Mr. Straub. A barista in a coffee shop steamed half the skin off her arm while keeping eye contact with a guy in the drive-thru. A doctor at the local clinic used a biopsy needle to inject air straight into his own heart.

Lots of people shot themselves, but not one of them aimed for the head. That's a weird touch, if you think about it. These people obliterated their torso, or limbs with high-powered rifles at point-blank range. No reason offered. Just a vacant expression as they deleted bits of their bodies and left nothing but ragged stumps.

There was no school the next day, which was the only real clue I got about how panic the local authorities were. Wouldn't be long before the national authorities joined in on the panic too, but that would come later. That morning my parents left the house at 9.30 for a meeting at the town hall, and they dropped me off at my grandma's on the way. I waited for them to leave before I told my grandma I was heading home. It was a hot day, and she only nodded her approval as she sat reading with my sister. She hated seeing me play video games and always encouraged me to go make my own adventures outside.

I had no plans. Didn't even want to see any of my friends. I thought a lot about Mr. Straub's face as I crossed empty farmer's fields and walked into the woods. I'd been to an open casket funeral once. It was for Father Dennis. It'd christened me as a baby, not that I remember anything about him, except his stony face resting gently in the soft white folds of his casket's interior. That seemed so long ago and so sterile that the thought of it was a bit sad but not a whole lot else. But Mr. Straub's face had frightened me with his swollen lips and bulging eyes.

Alive one moment and dead the next, with only pain to separate the two. And yet he looked so bored hanging there from his own broken neck, still wearing those ridiculous red shorts he always had on no matter the way. weather. It took time to recognize that seeing a dead body had freaked me out. I felt like it shouldn't have messed with me as much as it did. And I guess that's why there was a little bit of anger mixed in with all those thoughts in my head. It's also why I pushed on through the woods until the trees began to thin, marching in the humid summer until my t-shirt was soaked and my legs ached. I wanted to feel tired. Wanted it so the only thing I could think of,

were my throbbing hamstrings and sunburned forehead. It ended when I reached the tracks. Shaggy rocks and boulders rose steeply on the opposite side. Only other ways to go were left into town or right into a dark tunnel. Its mouth bristling with ivy. At least the air coming from it was cold, so I took a second to stand and catch my breath, feeling the sweat cool and evaporate as the wind billowed gently out of the dark.

I wasn't stupid though. I paid close attention in case I heard the sound of any passing trains. And when I did hear one, I raced off the tracks as quickly as I could. It honked as I came past. Another day and I might have worried that I was gonna get in trouble for playing on the rails. But all that I could really think of was the thing I'd seen lying by the tracks. It would have been lit up by the train as it came to. roaring out of the tunnel, not far from the entrance. In the strange silence, after the train had gone, there was only the dim light of the setting sun to see inside the tunnel.

And everything looked the same. Old clothes, broken bottles, discarded crates, trash strewn around wherever it found space. But I knew what I'd seen in the harsh white light of the train's passing beams, and it was a hell of a lot more than garbage. I'd seen a man. He was lying face down. There'd even be in a hand bright and pale like the moon and the night sky.

I was sure of it. I didn't know what to do. Not right away. I was afraid and didn't want to go inside. But I couldn't just pretend I hadn't seen anything either. I tried shouting to him. If someone down there heard me, they gave no sign of it. It wasn't until I actually stepped into the darkness and let my eyes adjust that I confirmed there really was a man.

It was draped across the tracks, and he didn't have any legs. And judging by the way the bloodstains had turned the color of his shirt, he'd been there for a while. Hell, half a dozen trains must have gone right over him thinking he was just an old bit of cloth or something. That's if they saw anything at all. In that time, he'd dried out a little. He wasn't a mummy or anything, but the... The blood on his stumps and coming out of his mouth looked more like jelly than corn syrup.

I was sobbing by this point. Crying as hard as I tried to make sense of what I was meant to do, while also feeling like all of this was terribly unfair on me. There was a moment where I could almost feel myself wanting to be a kid again. Little. One who doesn't have to do things. when you can get upset and scream and run away. I'd only just started to appreciate how badly I'd been messed up by seeing Mr. Straub,

and then Dodwin dropped that kind of nightmare in my lap. Forgive me. It appears a package has appeared at the door. Give me a moment. I'll return shortly. Thank you for your patience. The gentleman declined to tell me where he found the item, Which, unfortunately, only makes me more interested in it. So, what do you say? Shall we?

It wasn't a mummy or anything, but the blood on his stumps and coming out of his mouth looked more like jelly than corn syrup. I was sobbing by this point, crying as hard as I tried to make sense of what I was meant to do, while also feeling like all of this was terribly unfair on me. There was a moment where I could almost feel myself wanting to be a kid again. Little. One who doesn't have to do things. One who can get upset and scream and run away.

Only just started to appreciate how badly I'd been messed up by seeing Mr. Straub. And then God went and dropped that kind of nightmare in my lap. Teeth stained black with blood and open eyes that looked at nothing. It felt like a nightmare. Not just the moment, but the body, but everything else too. Everything since that beer beneath the tree it felt like it wasn't part of reality anymore. But nightmares end. I was outside, gasping, vomiting, crying my eyes out when I heard something shuffle in the tunnel I'd just run out of.

Part of me thought a sound must mean someone was alive and close by and that man I wasn't alone. But another part of me thought, something else entirely. It was the part of me that took over and stopped me from crying for making any more noise. My mouth turned dry as a desert, and all of a sudden I was no longer hot all over but cold, freezing cold. My legs were backpedaling away from the tunnel with short, quiet steps. The noise persisted. It was the shuffle of something getting dragged over gravel, old plastic bags. They had a rhythm to it, but it was slow.

The word that springs to mind is one I got taught in the biology class a long time ago. Locomotion. Some down there was moving. It was moving towards me. It sounded slow and broken and feeble, but that didn't matter. Somehow, even though I knew it was completely insane, I just knew what was going to come out of that tunnel. I knew it the way the rabbit knows the wolf or the ant knows the spider. But still, when I saw him crawl out of the dark and into the light,

I screamed so loud I'd have a sore throat for the next few days. It was the man from the tracks. And even though he moved, he was not alive. I tried telling myself he couldn't have been dead because only living things move. But that was horseshit. He dragged his bloody, legless torso with one work. arm while the other lay dislocated across his back. The fingers of both hands curling as he heaved himself along.

And that face, the same empty, gawking expression like Mr. Straub's. He wasn't alive. It was a dead thing. And that made him some kind of impossible monster. I turned and ran screaming through the trees. whole time I could only think of the thing that was behind me and what was trying to close the distance. It didn't matter that it was slow. It didn't matter that I ran for over an hour.

It didn't even matter that I wasn't sure if I knew my way home or was even running in the right direction. All that mattered was putting one foot in front of the other until there was nothing left inside me. Turned funny. Seconds moved in strange decadoes until eventually I collapsed on legs made a rubber. Then I dragged myself into an old tree hollow to hide. And that's where I lost all consciousness. When I woke up, the sun had set and it was dark. I vomited some and found my way back to the beaten path

and stumbled achingly through the cold night air back to my grandma's farmhouse. Dad was sick. My grandma screamed something to this effect at me as she held down his right arm while my mother tried to grip his head in her blood's slick hands. He resisted with dumb determination. My little sister cried, watching the scene like a shell-shocked soldier. It was grunting and sobbing and suddenly a bang. Then a puff of plaster rained down on my head and everyone began to yell and shriek a little louder.

Dad had a gun. That was what my grandma was trying to wrestle out of his hands. She held a knife and that's why there was blood, but I didn't know who it was. I wasn't sure what she was planning to do with it until she tried to use it to cut his trigger finger off. The scuffle resulted in another bang, and a window exploded outwards. I finally ducked and grabbed my sister,

rushing her into another room. But there were three more explosions, and each one broke something inside me. By the time I heard my name being called, I was half deaf and twitching at things that weren't there. My sister pleaded for me to come back, her pink fingers grasping for me as I put her down. But my mother was shouting for me to come and I wanted to keep my family safe.

She told me to get something to tie Dad up while she and my grandma used both arms to pin each of his wrists to the ground. His hand bled weakly as my grandma used every inch of her strength to simultaneously pin him and stop the flow. He thrashed slowly beneath him. His movement's languid and easy, but I could tell it was a struggle for them to keep him down. As I ran to the garage, I saw the gun on the ground with Dad's severed finger nearby. I kicked it out of reach before returning shortly with the rope my grandma used to tie the garage open during hot summers. Mom tied the knots. My grandma tried talking to my dad, and it was one of the few times in my life I saw her as the woman who had once changed his diapers.

She was so soothing and tender, and her constant muttering that everything would be okay seemed so fragile. She was scared for him. Mom just did everything in her power to wrestle some of her. safety out of the moment. Only once his arms were securely behind his back and she was confident he wasn't breaking free, did she stand back? Put her hands behind her and then immediately hunched forward and sob. Grams told me to call an ambulance as she walked into the other room to get my sister. Before I got the phone, I briefly hugged my mom who didn't seem to notice. I risked a glance of my dad. He didn't look at anything at all. Heased vaguely at nothing as he fought to

free his arms. When he finally looked at me, it was no different to how he looked at the floor or the wall. To be continued. P-A-P-Z-D, P-A-O-F-B-U-V-D. Thank you for your patronage.

Hope you enjoyed your new relic as much as I've enjoyed passing along its sordid history. It does come with our usual warning, however. absolutely no refunds, no exchanges, and we won't be held liable for anything that may or may not occur while the object is in your possession. If you've got an artifact with mysterious properties,

perhaps it's accompanied by a history of bizarre and disturbing circumstances. Maybe you'd be interested in dropping it and its story by the shop to share with other customers. Please reach out to Antiquarium Shop at gmail.com. A member of our team will be in touch. Till next time,

we'll be waiting for you whenever you close your eyes in the space between sleep and dream. During regular business hours, of course, or by appointment, Only for you, our best customer. You have a good night now. The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings.

Lot 1-35 from Beneath the Trees, Chapter 1. Consigned by Christian Wallace, starring Conan Freeman. From Beneath the Trees appears in the collection Shattered Teeth by Christian Wallace. Published by Vellox Books.com. Featuring Stephen Knowles as the antique dealer. Production and sound design by Kevin Seaman. Theme music by the Newton Brothers. Additional music by Coag, Vivek Abyshech, Clement Panchout,

Nicholas Redding, and Conan Freeman. The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings is created and curated by Trevor and Lauren Shand. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Antiquarium Pod. Call the Antiquarium at 646-481-7197.